Jonathan Cannon was buzzing.
There's a level of boundless energy and idea generation that leads someone to develop a six-pitch arsenal in the first place. And the White Sox asking the tall prospect right-hander from the Atlanta suburbs to refine and optimize it into something closer to four pitches that all worked together in cohesion had done nothing to blunt Cannon's enthusiasm.
Nor did asking him about it before 9 a.m. in the middle of the White Sox locker room at their spring training complex.
"Going into this offseason, the focus was what's going to be the most effective," Cannon said, explaining a switch to a harder curveball. "My issue last year wasn't the ability to throw it, it was the ability to command it. I think throwing two separate breaking balls [slider and curve], the question they asked me was, 'How often did you really have both breaking balls working?' That was a good question. I was like, 'Not that often.'"
Taken out of the University of Georgia in the third round of the 2022 draft, last year was Cannon's first full professional season and it contained more than plenty. His year began at High-A Winston-Salem with a wealth of strikes and ground balls, took a detour to a Futures Game appearance, and ended with the 23-year-old getting hit fairly hard at Double-A Birmingham while throwing 40 more total innings than he had ever handled in a single season in college.
As much as his SEC experience and plus command immediately led the Sox to label Cannon as a fast-riser, he spent the year getting heavy doses of experiential training of how his pitches need to work in concert with one another.
"It was really just about learning how to use my stuff," Cannon said. "The biggest learning experience from High-A to Double-A was figuring out what I need to do get those hitters out."
In ditching his slider, the White Sox reasoned that Cannon was already more comfortable commanding his cutter than almost any other pitch, and he spent his offseason working at Maven Baseball Lab in Atlanta trying to make it harder with more depth, so that the pitch could act as a mirror image to the sinker he throws to right-handed hitters. His power curve is supposed to play to left-handers, but Cannon and the Sox still felt he needed something that moved arm side to round out his attack.
Cannon delved deeper than ever into how to create such a thing.
"My changeup was a project this offseason as well," Cannon said. "Getting in the lab and seeing how my hand moves and how it needs to come off of there was a focus. You'll see a lot more changeups from me this year. It was really the first time seeing it. I've seen it, we all have the slow-motion cameras and everything, but I wasn't sure what it should look like. Once I saw how it should look and I hit it a couple times and it moved the way I wanted, it was a fairly easy adjustment to make."
This voracious appetite to learn, combined with preternatural strike-throwing ability out of statuesque starter's frame, fuels optimism that Cannon can transcend the critiques of his draft day profile, which is essentially that he lacks an out pitch, or unique bat-missing qualities to his mid-90s fastball. The current scouting critique to Cannon's immediate viability as a starter remains a lack of bat-missing ability, and that the adjustments and understanding of his pitches that will make him groundball-oriented back-end starter or multi-inning reliever are still rather raw.
Cannon has made 13 starts and pitched fewer than 60 innings above A-ball. With the wealth of alterations he has made over the offseason, internal enthusiasm is naturally going to outpace changes to external evaluations of him as a prospect. But he's clearly rising quickly in an organization where there was ample room to rise quickly, even prior to Dylan Cease leaving town in mid-March. That his debut comes as the franchise is in a literally historic tailspin adds a note of a team shuffling through options for their tattered rotation, even if Cannon debuting in 2024 always felt like a planned goal.
For whatever it's worth, Pedro Grifol stopped well short of announcing that Cannon's days in Triple-A are done, and pushed aside any notion of even setting his rotation with any new entries until after Thursday.
"The one thing we know is that we are comfortable with them pitching at this level," Grifol said. "When that timing is right, that stuff you just never know. This is a good time for us just because they fit right in to where we wanted them to fit in. It gives us a chance to give [Erick] Fedde a couple of extra days and [Garrett] Crochet an extra day. We wanted him to not go on five consistently throughout the year. It fit perfectly to where we could get our guys rested."
Nick Nastrini's happy debut
Nick Nastrini had pneumonia at the end of spring training, and found out Sunday morning that he had 15 minutes to pack his belongings so that a Charlotte Knights clubbie could drive him to the airport. His first day in the majors contained a pregame team meeting and a lifeless shutout loss in a three-fourths empty stadium. But at the end of a whirlwind last few weeks, he kept breaking into a broad grin postgame Monday night and almost got choked up talking about his family's role in making his debut possible.
"It was an out of body experience," Nastrini said. "It was everything I hoped it to be. It was fun. That's all I can really say about it. I don't really have a whole lot of words to describe it because there's not really words I can use to describe it. That's how fun it was."
"I feel like a proud big brother," said Jordan Leasure, who followed his friend with a scoreless inning just as he had longed hoped to do. "There is still a lot of excitement here with the team we have. We know we have the players. It’s not just young guys. I know all the older guys, the veteran guys are still pushing and trying to help the team win. But it definitely feels good to have Nick come up and I come up and start doing good. Kind of get this team rolling in the right direction."
At least someone is still upbeat.
Nastrini allowed two runs in five innings, striking out a batter per frame, with both his walks coming in a shaky fifth. He started out blazing 95 mph fastballs for whiffs in the zone early before slipping down to 92 mph late; a reminder that it was his first time pitching past four innings this year. Nastrini said that he kept throwing throughout his late spring bout with pneumonia, but breathing was a bit of an issue for a portion of it, as you might imagine.
An elevated right on right changeup to Bobby Witt Jr. serving as Nastrini first career strikeout -- probably his fourth option in that situation with a missed location to boot -- could only make him and Leasure laugh.
"When I have feel for that pitch it makes pitching a whole lot easier," Nastrini said. "Getting the first strikeout on the right-on-right changeup was pretty cool. It wasn't exactly what I imagined it would be on, maybe like a fastball or something like that. But it was cool."
A full-throated endorsement of Nastrini's place in the rotation would be a welcome sign of a player getting rewarded for a job well done, since so many roster decisions with this team are rooted in staying the course while the walls melt around them, but an unsettled rotation makes it awkward for Grifol to announce any commitments.
"We’ll have a day off on Thursday and we’ll regroup on Thursday and set it up the way we want to set it up moving forward," Grifol said. "It was an emotional day for him, his debut. Had a lot of people here. I thought he was, as expected, under control, good presence, pounded the strike zone. He retired the first 11. And faced a little adversity early, because I thought he had some pitches that could have gone his way that didn’t and he didn’t let it bother him. He just did a really good job all the way around."
What is happening?
Andrew Vaughn started his major league career 0-for-9 with five strikeouts back in 2021, but you could make the case that he's looked worse in staggering out to a .172/.250/.207 line in 64 plate appearances. Now that Andrew Benintendi has had a decent last couple of games, Vaughn is a more relevant person to ask Grifol about postgame.
"I feel like this word is mentioned every day, I just think a lot of these guys are pressing," Grifol said. "But it’s not something we can talk about every single day and use that crutch. We’ve got to make adjustments, plain and simple. The one thing I do know is that this won’t stay like this. Because it just can’t. And eventually when it doesn’t, and it breaks, they’re going to realize that whatever emotions and feelings they were feeling through this streak, was kind of a waste of time."
This is probably less than half of the full quote, but you get the idea.
